Burnout - When does work start feeling pointless? | DW Documentary

If you have ever worked in an office, you’ll know: It's often hard to concentrate, and then there are the endless meetings. Did somebody mention paperless office? And if you want a decision, you will have to wait for a bigger meeting.

To raise your spirits, you'll go to town halls, and hear from motivational speakers. And you might remember a time when you had one boss, but now you have two. .

. Three. .

. well, many. Sound familiar?

Well, all of these examples are taken from this: It’s a Second World War sabotage manual distributed to resistance fighters in occupied Europe, to cripple the enemy war machine. Somehow, we've taken known methods of sabotage and disruption. .

. and turned them into an ordinary day at the office. How did this happen?

If we start with Keynes. . .

Okay. And the 15-hour work week. Okay.

Can you tell us a little bit about what Keynes predicted and about what the hell went wrong? Yes, well, Keynes wrote this thing in the 1930s and he was trying to write something optimistic and imagine what the world would be like. For the most part, when people back then imagined what the world would be like, everyone thought, well, industrialization, it's miserable, but it's going to lead us in a direction where the technology's going to advance so far that we're all going to be living lives of leisure.

We'll have robot servants taking care of us. Automation will eliminate the drudgery of farm work, factory work, eventually service work as well. And that was, in a way, the point of all of this onerous work that people were doing in factories — it was to eventually get to the point where you don't have to do it anymore.

Globally, we're getting to the point where we could be working 15 hour weeks. The question then is: why aren't we? So what's really happened is that we've created these administrative office jobs.

And these have gone from something like 25% of employment, which they were in Keynes' time, to something like 75%. We created supervisory jobs, managerial jobs, clerical jobs. .

. And millions and millions and millions of them around the world. And one of things that really struck me in a lot of the testimonies that people sent to me about their jobs, was just how unhappy they were, and just how confused they were, over the fact that they were unhappy.

There's always this shame about expressing how you feel at work. The constant charade you're putting on and that you can never really be honest. Of course, you want, we all want, to be honest about our manager or about our director, but he's in that same charade.

So you only see half of him. So we're in this surreality, this play. The play is based on the original sabotage manual.

But we have not just stuck to the script, we’ve added many new scenes of our own. And like any play, this too has a cast of characters. The star of the show is a Chief Executive Officer, who has a star's salary to match.

The CEO's main role is to give the big monologue. We can accelerate our current momentum and gain a stronger financial backing with which to be more successful. This speech is often rooted in fantasy, and has very little to do with how the play will turn out.

We are now delivering the best products we have ever delivered. But paying them more doesn't seem to make them any better. As, all too often, they are the stars of spectacular failure.

It continues to be an exciting time for our devices and services business. We remain here to win. Thank you very much.

But the one cost that is never calculated is the human cost of all these failures. Of the disruptive reorganizations and the unhappiness that goes unspoken. I had finished my PhD in Experimental Social Psychology, so I had been trained to do research in the lab and I got my job at the University of California, Berkeley.

And I was thinking maybe what I'll do is, I'll develop some new ideas about emotions, which I had done laboratory research on, and how people understand their feelings, how they cope with really strong, emotional arousal, or threatening, challenging kind of things. And I thought, well, why don't I go out and talk to people who encounter this sometimes in their life. And I started interviewing them.

And they got emotional doing this. Some of them would get angry as they talked about things. Some of them would cry, some of them would, I mean, this was like.

. . And I'm thinking: Hmm, maybe there's a story here.

Maybe there's more of a phenomenon. So I would ask people at the end of the interview, things like, so when you talk about this with other people, do you have kind of a name for this? I mean, is there a way you share this?

Usually it was: ‘I never talk about this with anybody. I don't want anybody to know. ’ So I started looking at literature and trying to come up with concepts that seemed like they would capture or describe what people were telling me.

There was ‘dehumanization in self-defense’. Oh, no, no, no, no. You know, it's like too much baggage there.

The dehumanization. No, you know, you know. .

. Okay. What about ‘detached concern’?

Well, you know, it was kind of like, but it's oil, water. You can't, it doesn't, you know, didn't really do it. So I was still trying to figure out how to talk to people or about what they were telling me.

And so I would ask the next interviews at the end, you know, ‘dehumanization in self-defense’! ? No, no, no.

‘Detached concern’? - No. ‘Burnout’?

Yes. That's it! Burnout!

Yeah, first the physical: complete exhaustion. But this was like an exhaustion which was totally new to me. But it was really intense, like so intense that I could barely get out of bed physically.

I live on the first floor. I could not walk up the stairs, literally. I had to hold myself halfway through or stop twice even and catch my breath.

It was just, I felt like a 90 year-old in a very bad state. Well, I thought it was the flu. And at one point my GP, I went to my GP, and he really put it in front of me.

He said, this is not the flu. You have got all the symptoms of a burnout and, yeah, period. I remember very well, going back to work, after I think it was a good five months of being absent.

And I went back to work and tried to walk to the office. I remember very well thinking what happened to me. It was really like, I was confused.

Confused, angry, disoriented. Actually, what really popped into my mind then was: where the hell did I lose my exit. I mean, how come I continued on this freaking highway to where I'm at now, but I should have.

. . I missed my exit.

That's what came to my mind. I missed the freaking exit. I wanted to become an engineer, because my grandfather was an engineer.

And I thought: I want to be effective and efficient. So always having the bar super high. Perfectionism in order to show that you're successful, worth it.

Mediocrity is just not even an option. Your body is saying: time out. I had a burnout, but then what?

You really fall into this new world. It's almost like a new reality. My whole self and my compass, which I had been sailing on all my life, I realized that compass is wrong.

Because otherwise I wouldn't have been here. You feel like a failure because you're one of those people who fell through the gates into the abyss of burnout, and that's all down to you. If you think it's only you, or very few people, as opposed to more people, then the focus automatically goes: so what's my problem?

Why am I not strong enough? Why am I not capable enough? And so what we saw early on was a phenomenon that is known as pluralistic ignorance.

And what that means is that you're feeling something is going wrong, not just that you're exhausted and got too much to do, but you're shortchanging the work. You're not doing a good job, and you know it, and you're feeling bad about yourself. Well, you're not going to go over and chat with somebody at coffee about how you’re feeling.

No, what you're going to do is, you're going to put a smile on your face. ‘I'm fine. I can handle this.

I can do it. Okay. ’ And just move along and hope nobody notices.

What you don't know is that there are a lot of other people around you who are doing the very same thing. So your social perception is that everybody is smiling, happy, doing fine. I'm the only one who's got a problem.

When, in fact, the reality is behind those masks, behind that smiley face, there are a lot of other people thinking, oh, my God, I'm the only one. On top of the problem of not being able to say what you really feel, half the time you don't understand what anybody's saying. So if you think about your average meeting, the social contract is this: You'll sit there and speak nonsense and I'll sit there quietly and not listen to you and check my emails while you're speaking nonsense.

How it can empower the intelligent transformation? And accelerating adoption. .

. Connect and enable the new experiences. .

. Make the move to enable the application to truly gain knowledge. How to speak the language of management.

So, I blame a character called Charles Krone. He was swept up in the kind of new age mysticism, which was washing across the West Coast during the 60s and 70s. Krone gets hired by Pacific Bell and his job is to come in and engage in what they call a transformational change project.

Workshop participants take part in an exercise designed to broaden perception and increase sensory input. And Krone's role was really to kind of reprogram the employees by introducing them to his own personal philosophy, which was drawn from a Russian mystic called George Gurdjieff. Devotees of Gurdjieff would often engage in mystical dancing, reciting mystical poetry, et cetera.

And the board members of Pacific Bell were particularly keen on this. And they thought that their employees should get a bit of it as well. Now, if you look back to that language now, it sounded scandalous and strange at the time, but now it’s part of everyday language.

People need a justification for what they're doing. They need a language which makes these empty tasks, which people have in companies, to give them some substance or apparent substance. So there's the sense that “Kroning” provides a way of covering up the gaping hole, which is corporate life, often.

If you go back to the cause the burnout, what would you say if you had to narrow it down to only a few factors? What is it for you guys? What would you name as the key drivers of your burnout?

I think it had been coming out, like mild symptoms, but mostly, when I felt it really strongly, was I think back in March this year, where I kinda like felt myself not being able to do daily stuff, like running errands, or talking to people. Or where I felt overwhelmed by doing that. Wake myself up, brush my teeth, sit at the table — that was the hardest thing to do in the morning.

That was like the prominent symptom that lead me to recognize that I have a problem. It's embarrassing to admit, but I actually sometimes felt that it would be easier if I would get hit by a car in the morning on my way to work. Because that would solve the problem of not having to go there.

That was just how deep I was in my own misery. I felt so anxious, it sometimes felt impossible even, to go to work, because I knew what was waiting. And I just felt like if somebody or something outside of me would solve the problem, then I wouldn't have to think about it.

But these are things that I've only realized afterwards. I totally refused the idea that I was in burnout. I just felt like I'm invincible, I cannot have a burnout.

This cannot happen to me again. So it was kind of hard for me to start to realize, admit, accept, and process it. It was really a long process for me.

When they talk about exhaustion, if that's all it is, then why change the name? Why not just call it what it is, which is exhaustion? With burnout, we're talking about more than that.

The exhaustion response, what we think of, that's stress. It is the stress response. Chronic, everyday stressors.

Burnout is a signal. It's a red flag. It's a warning.

If you start seeing problems with burnout, it's telling you not who is burning out, it's telling you why. In the 19th century, we got this invention of a new professional class of people who were managers. Those managers often came from an engineering background.

So they were quite good at sort of tuning the machinery. They began then to see the people as cogs that they could potentially tune and make more efficient as well. In about the late 1970s, a corporation, a company, was no longer treated as an entity with people in it.

The purpose of the corporation is to maximize shareholder value. Companies began to say: how much human capital have we got? And they began to treat their employees like a kind of balance sheet, which they could measure, manage, as if they have no history, as if they have no family, as if they have no attachment to place.

It's not even just a cog in the machine. It's a flickering digital line on a balance sheet somewhere that can be easily deleted at the press of a key. Burnout is all in engineering.

I mean, rocket boosters burn out, you know, ball-bearings burn out. So it's not a surprise that when they started Silicon Valley startups, they called them burnout shops. They advertised as burnout shops, because this is what the life is going to be like.

But it was intended to be a limited time. It was intended to be a sprint - two to four or five years, max. Now the model is for a marathon.

This is the way we do business all the time, for years. The human body cannot run a marathon at a sprint pace. Most people come to work really wanting to make a difference.

And it starts with the most basic, clear expectations. So when people come to work, they need to know what their role is. And too often in organizations now, people don't.

One of the great challenges of leadership is bringing teams together. Creating a common purpose. How that mission or purpose comes to life is the manager.

It's the manager that helps that employee see how that work connects to that bigger picture. Often times, we put people in managerial positions for a couple reasons. We ask managers, how did you get into your job?

One reason, tenure. They've been around the organization a long time. Two, I was really successful as an individual contributor before I was a manager.

Neither of those two things correlate with being an effective manager. The motivation is: I want to be a manager, because I'll probably get paid more, I’ll feel like I've reached a higher level in the organization. Those are two human nature motivations that it's hard to get people out of unless you have a path where somebody can see they have a high esteem position, maybe even paid more than managers, for being an exceptional individual contributor.

They may not think about people as individuals, may not even naturally care about them as individuals that much. So they think almost completely about the work itself, and not about how that person can develop over time. So what it does is, it deteriorates the culture of the team.

But it also isn't good for the manager. But that's the system, or the right to passage, that's happened inside organizations. And if you're gonna ask me what a root cause of all this is?

That would be one of them. Here's the financial logic: You make somebody a manager, just because they're good at doing a certain job, and you pay them more, not to do that job anymore, and instead to do a job that they're not qualified to do. With the result that the productivity of everybody else in the team goes down, but you still have to pay their salaries.

Meanwhile, the new manager has to prove to his boss that he's still getting results. So he hires a management consultant to try and fix the problem. It produces a cool report, but half the time changes nothing.

But you still pay the consultant. Well, I mean, I don't know how many managers I had, but a lot and I think there were only two, so maybe 10%, that you could really have a personal conversation with. Which made a complete difference in how I was actually doing my job.

Can I ask a quick question? It's something that everybody has touched upon here. You know, you talk about the expectations from childhood about working life.

Do you remember a specific instance of that clash between expectations and reality? I was thinking about this. As I mentioned earlier, I'm the big sister in the family and I have a little sister.

She is two years younger than I am, and we are very different. She is the wild spirit and the one who has been searching for herself her entire life, whereas I've been more of the rational one, perhaps, and the one who gets good grades and just do what society expects me to do. And that's why I said earlier that I felt like there was this train for me.

So I jump on the train. Then there is the school, you get the good results, you do good, don't upset the teachers. Then, of course, I will go to university.

It's law school or medical school or whatever. Be the good girl. Maybe the point is, I feel like I was something, and then I was, shaped into, suffocated into being like something else, something less, something smaller.

And that's why I kind of developed the sense that I'm not good enough, and I am. . .

there is something wrong with me. Like there is something fundamentally, deeply wrong with me as a human being. And perhaps that is something that I've been trying to kind of then fix through these different achievements in life, like go to university, get those results, because I felt that that is my responsibility, as Vanessa, as the person I am.

Like I am the person who is supposed to do these things. One of the things that has fascinated me over the years is education. It's almost designed to destroy the natural curiosity we have as children.

Somehow when you're in primary education, they're beating that out of you, they're destroying that natural curiosity. Then when you go to higher education, that kind of gets halfway put back. You never quite get back to where you were when you were five, but you know, maybe you get a little of it, just enough that you can function as an intellectual.

Many of the rituals and structures of primary education are designed to prepare people for factory labor. That's why they have bells ringing and you have to get up and you have to move from room to room. And there's no particular reason you should have to move from room to room.

The interesting question for me is, why are they still doing that? Because it's not like very many kids going to school are going to be working in factories anymore. My conclusion is that they are preparing us for a life that isn't going to make a lot of sense.

They're teaching us not to ask questions about things that any intelligent person who hadn't been so trained would. Like: why are we filling out this form if we don't get any money either way anyway? Why are we writing this report, if nobody's going to read it?

All these things that anybody in a bullshit job really should be asking, but knows as a condition of their employment, that they shouldn't. If a guy shows up in a white coat or acting like he's an authority. .

. Faster than Nokia has ever gone before. .

. . just play along.

Children first figure out that they are separate from the world around them when they realize they can have predictable effects. Take the scenario where say a child is moving his arms around and he moves a pencil, there's a pencil there, and it rolls down the table, and he figures out that happens. If he moves his hand again, and it rolls a little further.

This is great! Oh, my God, you know? I am an entity that can have effects on things.

And that's the moment you realize you are a person, and there is a world, and they're not the same thing. And when you take that away, people just collapse. It shatters their sense of self.

Really, the very basis of what makes us human, or feel human. It strikes me that we need to reevaluate what we see as valuable in labor. Because if we've got to a situation where millions and millions of people around the world are coming into work every day saying there is no social value in what I do, it's pointless, there is a clash between what the market dictates, what our economic system identifies as valuable, and what people actually feel in their hearts is valuable.

There's a disjuncture. People feel there's something terribly wrong. They have some kind of notion that real work meets people's needs, desires.

. . It's about furthering something in humans that we wish to further.

So when you enter a company, they make you feel like you are blessed working for them, that they choose you to work for them. And it's not you that applies for the job, but they kind of pick up, pick you up from out of nowhere, and they choose you to be the blessed one working for them. So then you kind of have to feel your life is the company life.

So you don't have an identity anymore, but you are the company. So is this the lucky one? You're going to get married?

In Italy, we say when you have the prosecco bottle and you open it, the one who catches the cork will get married. Something like that. Yeah.

It is crazy. In three years, I have been assisting at three reorganization where people have been losing their jobs, where people have been crying, where they were working since 20 years or more. So in the back of my head, I always had the thought: you are giving the best of yourself to this company, but remember one day, they will call you and say, you have to pack your stuff in a week.

I had a relationship for a few years, we were living together, and, of course, we decided to start a family together. And then we could not buy a house together due to our incomes, because it was just too low. I was the one who had a better contract.

I had a better income. So I felt like if I fail in this job, we will not buy a house. So we will not build up a family.

It will all be my fault. So I was really stressed at home. I was doing extra work at home, so I was not really there as part of a couple, for living together.

At that point what happened to me is that I worked too much? to the point that I kind of destroyed my private life. I was really frustrated, because I thought I’ve worked hard for more than 10 years.

I want to settle down. I want to have kids. I want to do those kind of things, and I cannot.

Corporations are a grand example of the 'emperor has no clothes'. It's all about promise. It's all about what we're going to do in the future.

They're constantly undergoing these change processes, reorganization, restructuring, downsizing, rightsizing. You fire people, you hire people, you shift around the signs, but very little, at the end of the day, actually changes. We know lots of people lose from all of this.

There are any people who lose their job, and it often becomes extremely stressful for the people who stay. Often those things are done, not necessarily because they need to be, they're done because the CEO has to show that something's happening. Who it does impress is financial analysts, who set the price or make a recommendation of what they think the price of a share should be.

Nothing actually changes on how well the company does, but the share price goes up, because they've said the right thing to the financial markets. But that also means, because the CEO is often rewarded on the basis of stock options or share price, their pay goes up. One of the most pernicious things about our current economic system is that the more your work benefits others in an obvious and immediate sense, the more your work has a clear and undeniable beneficial effect on other human beings, the less you are likely to get paid for it.

If you look at the graphs, wages basically stay completely flat, whereas productivity continues to rise precipitously. So the big question is, what's happened to that extra profit? Again, the story we tell ourselves, and this time it's not entirely untrue, is that it all got pumped into finance.

Basically, the profits went to the richest 1% of the population, and they basically are gambling with it. I was running all my life to study and get a job in a company so I could have a good life: I'm going to buy an amazing house, you know, for myself, and then I want to be single and travel for a long time, and then I want to have kids, and settle down — it's just a big dream. It's just an illusion.

So for me to give up so much of my private life and not achieve the results that I expected to, it was just mind blowing. My brain stopped working, I can tell you, like, this is the feeling that I have now, like something broke inside my brain and I could not picture how that happened. It was unbelievable.

The original sabotage manual was written for a world where most people who worked operated a machine. But we've been just as effective at sabotaging work in our world, where most work relies not on a machine, but on the brain power of humans. The authors of the original manual would have been amazed at how effective our sabotage has been.

Only 20% of the workforce are engaged in their work. Those that manage them are seldom qualified for the job. And that less of the benefits of work goes to those who do the work.

Why are we creating — we, society — creating an environment in which people are doing really good work, necessary work, beneficial work, and making them do it in a way that it just sort of tears them apart and, you know, out they go. So how to make that realization, that the setting and the environment in which people function, really, as much as possible, how do we design it to make people really grow and thrive? We've known for a long time, all about ergonomics: that we have to design furniture and tools that adapt to the human body.

You may not like the way the human body was designed, but that's the way it functions. I guess I'm talking more about ergonomics in terms of the social, the psychological: what makes people tick? This is the weird thing for me, and this is the conundrum for me personally, because I love my job that I do at the moment, and I'm actually, for the first time in 20 years, doing something I really care about.

I feel like I'm making a difference. I'm working in a meaningful industry, but yet I'm still experiencing symptoms of a burnout. So how have I still got to this stage?

What is it that's gone wrong? You know, what is it that I've done wrong, maybe? Or why am I having panic attacks?

Is it because of. . .

You and I could have the same job, and there's something about it that drives you crazy and I'm okay. What has been discovered in a lot of research, by a lot of people, is at least six areas where that kind of job-person balance or imbalance, the fit or the misfit occurs, that can be predictive, if it's a good fit, of greater engagement with the work. If it's a bad fit, the risk of burnout becomes more of a problem.

The workload is always huge and there's no long-term projects. It's always like for yesterday that you need to deliver. So, the one that everybody thinks about is workload, and that is the one that is probably most clearly tied to problems with exhaustion.

And, basically, the imbalance there, or the misfit, is that the demands are really high, and the resources to handle those demands are low. You don't have enough time. You don't have the right information.

You don't have the tools, you don't, you know, there's no way that that can be done, given that. What’s the point. It's a never-ending process.

It’s never ending, it just goes and goes. You finish one task, and tomorrow you have plenty more, because they need to expand to other countries. The second one is control.

And that's really the extent to which you have some choice, some discretion, some autonomy, some way of deciding how best to do the job, given what it is like today. As opposed to, you have no discretion, no choice, you must do this. And what we find is, it's not so much workload, but if you have high workload and you have high control, no problem.

It's when you have high workload and no control. It's like Sisyphus pushing up the rock and all of a sudden, at the end of the day, it's back. When there is insufficient reward, that means that no matter what you do, how successful you are, how great you are meeting the deadlines and getting things done or something, no good feedback comes.

The reward is not just about the salary or the benefits — I mean, I don't want to throw that out, but, I mean, that's not usually the biggies. The biggies are the social recognition, the appreciation, that somebody noticed you really, you know, oh my gosh, you really got us out of a bind there by the thing that you did and, oh, thanks so much. And you know, we couldn't have done it without you.

Little things like that. God, I'm going to have the logo in my eyes soon and I'll just be walking around like a zombie. Because it was like, you know, and you have to live and breathe our values, and you need to be a change agent, and you need to do this, and you need to do that.

Community is really the social environment, the people you come in contact with on a regular basis. Okay. We have a flexible time.

We have a flexible working time, but every day at 10:00 AM you have a meeting. So, I mean, how can this be flexible? Can I work from 12 to 9 PM?

No. When it works well, when there is social support, mutual social support —you know, we sort of help each other out, if somebody is unclear, we kind of clarify — when there is trust, when there is kind of respect for each other and, you know, a notion of reciprocity — when all of that is working well, quite honestly, it is like money in the bank. Even though I gave them the message, Listen guys, this is too much for me.

And I got a burnout, because of this, they don't care. They just hide the problem and they keep on doing whatever they have to do. When people feel they are working in a place that is unfair, that treats people unfairly, this will raise the level of that cynicism sky-high.

And if there is a value conflict, it's even worse. We need to take into account what human beings are like and how they function. What makes them motivated?

What makes them do great things? What do they need to recharge and reboot and, you know, have a life? For generations, people thought they were working really hard to someday create a world where people don't have to work so much, where robots will do the unpleasant drudgery, repetitive, stupid labor that nobody really wants to do.

Now, we're living under a system, a capitalist market system, which is supposed to be efficient. It can allocate resources in a way that will guarantee the maximum production and profitability. Maybe it makes people unhappy, but ultimately it creates greater good by being the most efficient system anybody could ever imagine.

I mean, any efficient system, you’d think, should be able to reallocate resources in such a way that we work less and everybody still has enough to eat. If we can't do that, there's something terribly wrong. I mean, we have an insanely, ridiculously inefficient system.

I think we should change the way we think of the economy. Let's not talk about production and consumption anymore. Most work isn't actually making stuff.

It's not changing it even, you know, transforming it to make it into something else, it's trying to keep it the same. You know, you’ve got to take care of things or else they fall apart. Then they tell us, well, you know, we're going to create robots that will get rid of all our jobs.

This is a big problem. Well, you can't have people have too much leisure time. They'll be depressed.

They'll just sit around and watch TV all day. They won't, they won't be able to figure out what to do with themselves. People do want to contribute to the world and make the world better for the people around them.

And left to their own devices they're more likely to do something useful then if they're not. Well, how do we know we're not going to have a world full of annoying street mimes or bad poets, awful musicians? Or crank scientists with hollow earth theories, or who trying to create perpetual motion devices?

All we need is one of those bad musicians to be Miles Davis or John Lennon, or one of those crank scientists to be Einstein, and you've pretty much made back your investment.